About the Game
The latest game in the popular Majesty series, Warlock: Master of the Arcane introduces turned-based strategy and global conquest to the fantastic world of Ardania. In a time of chaotic upheaval, the player takes the role of a great mage, a warlord vying for ultimate power. Your mission is to build an empire, expand your borders, research new spells and conquer your enemies. Become the ultimate Warlock and rule over all of Ardania!

I just played the demo and was really surprised by it. Anyone disappointed by elemental war of magic should be pretty happy with this one. Basically if you like civ or better master of magic, you're probable gonna like this. The demo was a lot of fun but their is a turn limit, so your not gonna play a full game. I really recommend trying the demo, I've really heard nothing about this before so it's a real pleasant surprise.

*First catch all sort of thread for me, tell me if I should change anything or if I'm not supposed to do this yet.

I'm somewhat interested in this game, but has there been any comment as to why they lifted the Civ 5 interface? Like, not even subtly? Admittedly there are only so many ways to do a hex-based TBS, but this looks like a mod being played within Civ 5. Is there any background that I'm missing?

I'm somewhat interested in this game, but has there been any comment as to why they lifted the Civ 5 interface? Like, not even subtly? Admittedly there are only so many ways to do a hex-based TBS, but this looks like a mod being played within Civ 5. Is there any background that I'm missing?

I guess they figured, why fix what ain't broken? I'd actually like to see more of that sort of thing. FPSs have the WASD standard (even though it should be ESDF), I don't see why we can't have some interface standards too, and Civ 5 has a great user interface. It sure made learning to play Warlock a whole lot easier.

Personally, I'm glad to see Civ V's UI design borrowed; it was the game's greatest achievement. I hope other games follow suit. Endless Space has certainly borrowed elements from Civ V's UI design, much to its credit.

I finished my first full game last night, and was very pleased overall. There are some interesting spells, and the tactical combat is really fun, especially with mixed units and terrain. Late game elite units with tons of buffs really just stomped on things.

Next game I'm going to try to make better use of naval and airborne units. My game had a big lake in the middle with a Kraken that killed every unit I sent that way, so I didn't fool with it much. (I did end up getting him back with some water-walking assassins later in the game).

I do miss the world changing spells MoM had, which were always fun; coat the land in darkness, or make a new volcano appear every turn That kind of stuff was a delight.

Question: I can't seem to figure out what makes territorial boundaries expand, though. Is it at certain set population levels?

I started a new game on challenging and after many turns my closest neighbour, Miralbus the Hat, just finally created his second city. I have about 30 cities entirely surrounding his tiny kingdom. Up until this point he's done nothing but slowly explore my territory with a single unit of imps and gradually build up his capital city. I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish, but whatever it is I'm pretty sure he's failing at it.

So I decided to try for a religious victory. I maxed out my reputation with Lunord, then waited around for an enemy avatar to show up. Eventually, an Avatar of Helia spawned close to my capital. It's a flying unit that does enough damage to 1-shot any unit in the game, plus it has a 3-turn cooldown ability that nukes a unit plus all surrounding tiles. Crazy high resistances to everything, and 1000 HP. That's just retarded. I hit it with a fully upgraded level 8 Flying Line Galleus and it did 9 damage. Most other ranged units did 1-2 damage. Melee wasn't an option because it 1-shots everything so I'd just be throwing units away. Also, it's apparently immune to debuffs - stun, blindness, weakness all did nothing. If I surrounded this thing with the best ranged units I can make, and continually resurrected or replaced every unit it killed, I might be able to kill it in 50-100 turns, assuming I'm not bankrupt by then and that it hasn't already destroyed my capital.

In comparison, I had already researched Unity and had over 3000 mana saved up. I had also killed all but two enemy mages already and could have finished off the remaining ones ages ago if I hadn't been messing around trying to reach either the economic or religious win condition. I guess the moral of this story is to never go for the religious victory.

Okay so been playing my game on impossible... what's impossible about it? As undead i rushed Dracolich popped one had him patrol my ever expanding boarders taking mage cities left and right built up enough cash got a second and third one and now it's freaking game over I've steam rolled the Rat just destroyed Ashar and suddenly everyone else wants peace after turns and turns of "We want your stuff or WAR!!!" "Oh wait your bigger than us... peace please?" I've got three cities now capable of producing draco's or Flying Galleus, the rest focus on mana production or gold production and no one can stop me. For all their declarations of war only green ever launched an actual attack at me with a combination of shaman's, rats, and ratmen all of whom were utterly eaten by my draco's when i turned them around from destroying the rat king for 10 turns. Now i can field stubborn knights (lots of donkey resources) and fully perked out (thanks to gold production) they have an attack of 47 at lvl 1 and solid resistances enchant them with flying and zoom off they go.

- Changed Domination victory conditions - now it is enough to control >50% of Holy Grounds in all worlds combined (it was needed to control all of them before)
- fixed crash with click on news about new building in destroyed city
- fixed no upkeep bug with units in transport stance
- fixed exploit with clicking on debuffs
- fixed difficulty settings bug
- fixed experience gained by Powerful Lords

I just finished my first game attempting to win with the Unity spell. I have to say, the win condition balance feels way off.

Unity took forever to pull off compared to a military victory, and that was with a ton of research points. I had enough research (>150) to get each spell in a round, but then it took ten turns to research unity, 8 turns to get my mana from 2000 to 5000 to cast it, and 10 more turns to cast it (with Agile Mind). I spent the last 22 of those turns just hanging around the last city left of an enemy mage, but not invading because I wanted to see the other ending. 22 turns is a LONG time.

I love the varied conditions, but that felt much too difficult compared to a military victory, to the point of wondering why even have it. I was really enjoying that playthrough up until I decide to hang around for Unity; I would have no qualms if I had just finished it off by conquest.

I've read that they are going to adjust the victory conditions. We shall see. I like this game, the early-mid game at least. It does suffer from what a lot of other long-form strategy games do in that it feels like the devs seldom made it past mid-game and hence did little to adjust the end game. Which ends up being either a slog or just unbalanced, and not in a fun way.

I've read that they are going to adjust the victory conditions. We shall see. I like this game, the early-mid game at least. It does suffer from what a lot of other long-form strategy games do in that it feels like the devs seldom made it past mid-game and hence did little to adjust the end game. Which ends up being either a slog or just unbalanced, and not in a fun way.

That would be fantastic. My first two games were both conquest wins, which felt just right. This was my first shot at the magic research win, and now I really get some of the end game complaints.

I wasn't a fan of the rambling, but a solid TMA episode. I think I'll start playing this again as just two or three turns a night. I stopped because my game came to many important and harsh decisions for me. Should I go through the Portal I just cleared on my dimension? Should I even be attacking one of the two major opponents when my economy is in the the dumps and my army fairly scattered? Because man, a coastline full of cities, ships, and forts are such a pain.

Don't know what's wrong, but I hope things turn up for you, Michael.

"Duke Nukem Forever's switch from Quake II to Unreal technology took six weeks, but it will ultimately save months of development time."
@Holysh*tMatt